Alex Garland explored the slide into fractious factionalism in Civil War. Now he turns his gaze towards the ferocity of combat in new film Warfare, which stars Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and Charles Melton.

Joseph Quinn's excruciating howls of pain go on and on, and on and on in Warfare, continuing long after most films would have moved forward. The relentlessness of those cries, with his leg one bloody open wound, defines what is so unique and effective about this real-time 90-minute immersion into an actual US mission in Iraq.

Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was its military advisor, have co-directed a bold marvel of a film. Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing.

Warfare feels even more visceral because it arrives when actual wars are raging, from Israel and Gaza to Ukraine, giving the film more immediacy than it might have had even just five years ago.

Civil War extrapolated from today's politically divided world into a near-future where combat tears across the US. The film's marketing, somewhat disingenuously, claimed it was apolitical, but that was only true in the sense that this dire warning didn't endorse specific political parties. Warfare is more truly apolitical, focusing on the nature of war itself by way of one that happens to be in Iraq.

Mendoza was part of the 2006 mission the film depicts, an operation that was not major or particularly notable, just a cog in the war machine. Minutes into the film, a group of US Navy Seals – played by first-rate actors including Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, Kit Connor and D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai – creep into an Iraqi town to do surveillance ahead of ground troops arriving the next day. They take over a house, dragging its residents out of bed and smashing through a wall between two apartments, and soon spot al-Qaeda jihadists gathering across the street. Tension builds, but nothing prepares us for the shattering sound or the bloody impact when a grenade is lobbed into their window.

Let's not exaggerate that immersive element. Sitting in a cinema doesn't come close to the reality of combat, but Warfare does what film does best, recreating the feelings of fear and simple will to live when you are trapped, a........

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